It has been assumed as a “best practice” for a long time that reciprocal links between websites have either no effect or have a negative effect.
The idea that reciprocal links will harm rank probably comes from Google Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes.
If you search for some answers on reciprocal links within the SEO community, you are likely to come across articles that really don’t provide an answer. That is where we come in.
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It comes from the Google Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes, basically they say do not do reciprocal linking and it is not overly clear, they do not specifically say reciprocal linking but it is interpreted as these are reciprocal links, do not do that.
This test was run two different times, one with a fairly weak link as the reciprocal link and one with a fairly strong link as the reciprocal link.
The test one, all of these pages have an outbound link going to the target page and only the number 2 has an incoming link, the reciprocal link coming in.
That is the variable that we are testing and it moved right up to number one and it stayed there.
Test number two had a very strong link.
You might thing of these as expired domains link or pbn links but the cheaper version and the stronger version is what we are looking at.
The one that received the reciprocal link popped to number 1 quite quickly, two days later, which is really surprising cause often when we are running these sorts of tests, it can take a while for links to take effect.
The reciprocal link may have helped that and speed up the time that the links take to take effect.
This is fantastic results cause I think what you really need to do is look at what Google is saying and if you go into the guideline, it says excessive link exchanges. Link to me and I will link to you, or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross linking.
If you remember 1999 or 2002, there were a lot of pages in the internet where you could find that “link your website here” and you can be on random sites and when they have verified that you put their links on your site, you would have your link to that page.
That is a reciprocal link but it is also an excessive link exchange. It is that partner page, that page that is set up just for that purpose and that is what Google is trying to avoid.
Reciprocal links by and large are natural and understandable.
If I have a jewelry store and you have a jewelry cleaning service, it makes sense that we may link to each other.
I am selling this stuff, you clean them, we are in the same niche, it is just a natural thing to have and do. There is no reason for Google to have any heartburn about that.
That is what I think this is demonstrating.
Getting a reciprocal link isn’t a bad idea. In fact, it can be quite beneficial and you can get a lot of benefit from it.
If you are starting to get into a link scheme, that is when you can run a foul of what is going on.
But just having a few reciprocal links here and there isn’t going to harm anything and if you could get a good reciprocal link, you can do it by providing a link, all the better and it is something that you should do.